


Must Be Tuesday.

by Kali Cephirot (KaliCephirot)



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Young Avengers
Genre: Age Difference, F/M, Sex Pollen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-05
Updated: 2013-05-05
Packaged: 2017-12-10 13:01:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/786311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KaliCephirot/pseuds/Kali%20Cephirot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Form B4-309 is where you put a list of the people that, if you were in no way to give an informed consent presently, you'd trust enough for make the choice for you. Clint is Kate's third option.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Must Be Tuesday.

It starts with paperwork on a Saturday. Katie comes in as he's elbows deep in crap – not literally at the moment: apparently there are no plumbers in Bed Stuy that work after four on a Saturday, no matter how much you offer to pay them, but he has been washing his hands and arms for what it feels forever and the scent hasn't faded – wrinkling her pretty nose at the sight and the smell.

“Where did you go all dressed up, Katie?” He asks, washing for the fourth time.

Kate shrugs off a jacket that probably could pay the rent of one of his apartments for a month, unbottoning the top of her blouse. “Appointment with Nick Fury and Captain America.”

“Whu?”

“You know, since apparently they did decide to consider my team and I part of the Avengers and all. I had _no_ idea there was so much paperwork involved, ” Kate takess off her heels as well before she goes into the kitchen, opening the fridge and taking out two beers, leaving one for him nearby.

[[MORE]]

Usually Clint likes to be an ass and bother her about not being legal yet for that – because, obviously, Kate can fight and risk her life everynight if the world needs to, but she shouldn't be able to have a drink every now and then for seven more months: everyone knows that drinking responsibly is an ability you only acquire when you're twenty-one – but considering the kind of meeting she just had, he figures that she earned one free-of-bullshit drink.

So instead he says 'thanks' and dries of his arms before taking his own beer, drinking in companiable silence for a swallow or two.

Then: “I want to ask you something, but you're not allowed to freak out.”

“... you do know that's the best way to get someone to freak out, right, Katie-Kate?”

“You can't freak out because it's _not_ a big deal, ” Kate says, except she's doing that Katie-thing where she's not looking at him, frowning a bit, playing with the label of her bottle.

“... okay, shoot me.” and he doesn't say that he is, actually, kinda freaked out pre-emptively.

Kate takes another swig of her beer and Clint resists the urge to say the same. Then, when he's about to ask what's happening, Kate says:

“Form B4-309.”

Suddenly Clint _is_ taking a swig of his own beer. A long, long, long, long one. Kate doesn't have to explain anymore. 

Form B4-309 is a standarized form between both SHIELD members and the Avengers and it's, basically, a consent form in case of... weird crap. Relating sex. Like, alien pollen makes you want to hump the nearest available person? Well, form B4-309 is basically where you put a list of the people that, if you were in no way to give an informed consent presently, you'd trust enough for make the choice for you.

“I already put two of the three needed people,” Kate says, still not looking at him. “But the form says it's better if the people you list aren't all in the same team because you never know, and while it says it's okay to put a civilian if you're in a relationship with them, it also recommends it's someone who lives in the city.”

“But, Katie...”

Kate sighs and looks at him. “Look, if it's going to make things weird between us, just say no and I'll keep it at two people, it's no big deal, or I'll also put Noh-Varr. If they'd let me put Antonio Banderas, we'd be set, but no dice.”

“Shouldn't you be putting in your boyfriend first, girly?”

“One, not my boyfriend and I don't even know yet if I want him to be or not. Two, because we're at _that_ point, I would rather not make our relationship much more confusing by asking him to sign a form that says that he has my consent to get me off if I'm not in my senses. ”

Clint is very proud of himself that he _doesn't_ ask 'and you'd rather make our relationship weird'. But Kate has always been the smarter hawk because she rolls her eyes as she looks at him.

“Look, doofus, I trust you. With my life. Yes, it'd be weird and that's why you're not the first nor second choice, but if I'm at that point, I would trust you to help me.”

Well, how can he say no to that?

He sighs and shrugs. “Who're your other two options?”

“Not that it's any of your business, but Tommy and America. And Eli as a fourth option.”

“America? As in, America Chavez?”

“Well, yeah. Have you _seen_ her legs? ”

*

When it happens, six months or so after Kate asked, Clint doesn't count it as the first time or any weird shit like that. It's Katie's team down with a sex-spell on which means America isn't an option since she's down toand Tommy Shepherd's unavailable due to a mission of his own.

So it's him holding Katie, his nose against her hair as she clings to him and begs him please in what sounds more like pain than lust, his fingers deep inside her and feeling as she comes around them, promising her in soft whispers that he's got her, he's there, she's safe. She keeps her clothes on, there's no making out, no foreplay.

He doesn't count it as the first time they have sex because it wasn't about sex, not really, but about helping his partner. Kate got injured in a mission, basically, and he was helping her through that injury. He's not the kind of asshole who would consider that as sex. The next morning Kate fake leers at him and offers to buy him dinner, he mock-swoons and things don't change between them.

But while it wasn't sex, it takes something out of his resolve not to think of Kate that way. Something that starts making him think of how Kate would look with a flush on her face and her eyes needy, of how it would look if she was coming because she wanted to and not just because of a spell.

It doesn't change them but it changes things, maybe.

*

Steve's birthday party has them, as it tends to happen, in uniform, instead of having a barbecue because that's their life and that's Steve's luck. After almost forty hours of fighting an evil invasion off their planet – successfully this time, he might add - he and Kate stumble upon his apartment in equal amounts of tiredness, putting their bows down and letting empty quivers hit the floor.

“Lucky?” Kate asks, dropping her belt. Clint has no idea what time is it, but it's probably way too late to go and pick him up from Simone's.

“Later.”

And it's until they're both lying on the bed that he realizes that, well. They're both on the bed. (Yes, on: pulling off the covers and THEN back over themselves involves way too much effort at the moment).

“Katie.”

The way her nose wrinkles makes him smile even as she curls into a smaller ball of tiredness and exhaustion, a smudge of something he is going to pretend isn't blood on her face, near her nose.

“Sleeping, shush.”

Clint thinks of standing up then and going towards the couch since it's what he should do, what he usually does when Kate crashes at his place. But he's exhausted and surrounded by bed and warmth and even Kate's presence is a soothing balm that lulls him into a quiet sense of relief and comfort the likes he has almost never known.

He barely manages to find a 'I should go' inside his brain and doesn't manage to say it out loud before he's already deeply asleep, arms underneath the pillow.

Clint wakes up with an arm around Kate, her head on his bicep, both of them side by side. The arm that's working as her pillow is crawling full of pins and needles and despite that Clint suddenly has no desire to move at all, struck by a quiet sense of... her. Kate's also awake, blinking slowly at him, as if considering. Her eyes are red, her face still smudged and her hair is a tangled mess. Clint is pretty certain he has never seen her look more beautiful.

“Morning,” he croaks.

That makes her smile, but it's something slow and molass-y. His chest feels tight. “We probably need to get up.”

“Probably,” he agrees.

His hand is on her hip where her uniform opens. Try as he might, he can't resist to just touch the skin there, watch how when his thumb brushes her hipbone, Katie's pupils widen and darken.

“This is probably a bad idea, Katie.”

She shrugs a little, just once.

“So it can also be a good idea, bossman?”

“Katie...”

She kisses him then and all is fucked, mostly his resolve to not do this. Her mouth is sour with sleep and his can't be any better, so he kisses harder, searching for her actual taste, rolling on top of her. Kate does this thing where she's both stretching and making sure every single part of her is touching him, from the tip of her toes to the inside of her arms to the very tips of her fingers as she threads them through his hair. It's both a lazy kiss with no sense of hurry and a _hungry_ one because he can't stop kissing her, not even to the very necessary thing of taking off the uniforms they both slept in and, you know, kevlar isn't easy to take off even when your body isn't sore, much less when it's sore _and_ you're waking up _and_ you're suddenly horny as fuck. 

But the thing about Hawkeyes is, they are very resourceful individuals. Without having to stop more than a couple of times, they manage to get undressed, trying to be mindful of bruises and cuts but too busy kissing and touching to actually pay attention. Clint just has to kiss Kate again, listen to the sound she makes as he sucks a nipple inside his mouth, has to learn the way she bites her lips and flushes all over because the time-that-doesn't-count he made himself not notice.

But now that he can he's starving for all of that makes Kate _Kate,_ ravenous for her. When he kisses her navel, the scent of her cunt makes him dizzy and, come what may, Clint knows he's never forgetting the way she gasps a 'Clint' when he licks into her.

Her nails scratch at his scalp. Clint's hand grasp at her thighs as he licks into her, tasting her, fingers reading into the almost telegraphic shivers of her thighs, at the content-needy way her hands pull and let go of his hair. She doesn't make a noise as she comes, but she clings tightly to his head like a vice. Clint keeps licking into her, at her, feeling the tremors going through her, so hard it almost _hurts_ when she bucks against his mouth and he makes her come _again_.

Kate pulls at his hair before he can see if he can manage to get her off a third one, gasping for air even as she kisses him hard, moaning. Clint resists the urge to thrust against her just then, just enjoying how she feels inside his arms, distracted enough by her kiss and her scent that he almost misses her question.

“Bwah?”

“Condoms?”

“I...” he hadn't bought last time he actually went to do the groceries because, with his love-life being what it was, he was actually attempting the single thing for a while and he might have to jump from his own window.

Kate snorts at his panic.

“You're a doofus,” Kate laughs against his mouth, licking at her own taste. If she wasn't wrapping her clever fingers around him and stroking, he'd try to feel bad about that.

But she _is_ stroking him, clever archer calluses different than his own on his cock, and with the way that Kate sucks at his tongue and nips at it makes him think of how it'd be to have her mouth on _his cock_ and Clint kisses her harder, presses his face against her neck and just breathes and thrusts against her hand and ends up biting her shoulder as Kate makes him come.

Clint could have stayed there forever more, but Kate pushes at his chest.

“You're heavy, Hawkeye,” she says, stretching. “And I need a bath.”

“So if I say we can save water, Hawkeye...”

“I'm telling you 'in your dreams'.”

So she gets the bath first, using the change of clothes she always keeps in his place. Kate goes out to buy them some breakfast-slash-brunch as he takes a bath. There's coffee and bagels and she's finishing her coffee when he comes out. There's a condom box by his coffee as well as a smirk from Kate, even as she finishes her own coffee and walks back into his room.

He finishes his food in record time.

*

They decide that it's only going to be a one time thing – well. A one day thing, really, because after the third time, calling it a 'one time' was probably stretching things too much.

But the point is: Kate has her not-relationship-yet with Noh-Varr, Clint's car crash of a love life is on a break and while he ended up being a lying liar that lies about not-sleeping-with-Kate, neither of them wants a relationship with each other. Or, well: a romantic one because their partnership is staying for good: Clint would be willing to sign papers on that one.

And the proof of that is that things don't go awkward between them, which Clint had feared. But there's no lovestruck Kate (and he is NEVER, EVER in the history of HUMANITY ever telling her that he had considered she might get to be that because he likes his spleen _inside_ his body and not as Kate's target practice ) and even himself. He mocks her. She mocks him. She keeps stealing his coffee. She has his back.

Clint thinks that, maybe, finally, he managed to have a one night stand that _isn't_ going to fuck up everything in his life, for once.

Which is of course when it happens again.

*

They're fighting. It's pretty bad because he almost died, which caused Kate to panic and, well. A panicky Kate is a will-scream-your-ear-off Kate. Which he should've known: he didn't lie but he knows he didn't tell Kate the truth and the mission went badly because of that. It's a very slippery-slope between truthfulness and lying and while that could stand between a normal team, maybe, it doesn't belong in a partnership. When it's just two people, when its doing what he and Kate do, he knows that there needs to be trust.

“How the hell are we supposed to work together if you can't trust me?”

“I trust you, Kate!” And the sad part is that he does, probably more than he should, because god knows that when he finally manages to push her away it's going to hurt like hell when she goes.

“Amazing way to show it, Clint!” Kate's fists curl tightly. “If you don't want me here, you know, you could just say so and I'll stop obviously wasting my time in something that you don't even care to--”

And he kisses her because she has no idea how her words hurt and because he can't tell her out loud how much he wants her to be there and because he already fucked up, what can it hurt?

Except Katie kisses back. Angrily, still fighting. She makes an angry noise that goes into his mouth and directly to his groin. She kisses him hard, almost biting, arms wrapped around his neck, tiptoing. When he gets both hands under her skirt and under her ass she helps him with that, wrapping both legs around his waist, giving a little grunt when he leans her hard against the wall, and she holds on as he lets go so he can dig his wallet out, take the little square of tinfoil for the condom out, doesn't even complain that he just pushes her underwear out of the way so he can push inside her.

Instead Kate curses as he gets in, head thrown back. Her fingernails press against his shoulders and Clint just breathes once before he starts thrusting in, hard, Katie's legs tight around his waist. She feels good, better than good, more than anything he feels comfortable admitting or even thinking. Kate keeps cursing against his mouth, sounding angry and sad at the same time even as she squirms on his cock, tilting her hips and Clint wants her to  _not_ sound like that pretty much more than anything he has ever wanted, except, maybe, making her come.

“Don't stop, fuck,” Kate moans, her teeth against his shoulder as she trembles, tensing, and she bites when she goes off, and then Clint lets go too, pushing harder, harder, almost...

She's still clinging to his arms when he stops seeing white. His legs are shaking, but it takes him two tries before he manages to move to let her down without dropping her. She's not that steady on her feet, either.

“You're a jerk, you know, Clint?”

“I've been told,” he winces. “Once or twice.”

“Not enough times,” she smooths her skirt down. Clint takes off the condom and goes to throw it out, bringing out a water bottle for her.

“I'm sorry,” and thing is, he is. Clint could try to explain why the idea of her dying scares him into stupidity, but somehow, he's pretty sure that Kate won't take that for an explanation either.

But she sighs, taking the water. She's still angry, but she looks at him square in the eye and she's not so will-pick-up-my-bow-and-use-it-don't-you-tempt-me.

“If there's a next time, I'm using you as a target.”

Katie-Kate, more consistent than any clock.

*

It sort of becomes a blur after that, enough that Clint just stops numbering them. Because they're not frequent enough to merit a definition, he doesn't think, but they still happen. Sometimes. It's not a thing but it might, maybe, be something. Kinda.

But then, it's also hard to say when they're going to happen or why. Sometimes it's after mission adrenaline: Kate on her knees, pressing him against the door, licking a wet stripe on his cock and nuzzling down to lick at his balls, both of them still mostly geared up and his hands tangled in her hair, trying desperately not to thrust against the silken warmth of her mouth and tongue. Sometimes it's after they end up fighting because make up sex is awesome no matter if it's a significant other or a partner, apparently.

And the ones that scare him the most: when its out of no reason whatsoever. When it's them watching a movie on his TV and then Kate nuzzles against his neck, or when he leans towards her and kisses her just to feel her smile and then Kate is on his lap, riding him slowly and deeply, both of them smiling and laughing and sharing slow after slow kiss.

Because it's  _not a thing._ One week they can go at it like bunnies, each and every single night finding him between Kate's legs, three more weeks without so much as a look that could be considered iffy. But Clint has learned the way Kate looks as she comes, the sounds she makes, how she looks when she's making  _him_ come. Most of the time she doesn't sleep at his place, not even after they have sex. 

But it's getting too close to becoming something and... Clint is pretty damn sure he doesn't want that. Pretty sure that Kate doesn't want that either, really.

So, when he gets the form B4-309 that he needs to update, he takes it as a sign that he needs to tell Kate that they should stop is totally a good thing, right?

“Seriously.”

Except Kate is in her underwear, putting on her bra – the one he likes the most, worn soft and perpetually lilac-scented – when he tells her they should stop with the sex.

Okay, so he could have said they should stop this later. Or earlier. Not right after.

“Look, Katie... it's just a bad idea. It's changing things. Or it will. Not in the nice way. We shouldn't have started. Since that's already done we should... stop.”

And Clint wonders if he's going to have time to cover his junk before Kate shoots it off. But Kate glares at him and then she shrugs, still looking pissed.

“Fine.”

“What?”

“I said, fine,” Kate moves to pick up her clothes. “It's not like we're dating or anything.”

“Katie, don't be mad.”

“I'm not. Or, well, not because of this exactly,” she sighs and looks at him. “You have the lousiest of timings, Hawkeye. And I'm not happy about this.”

He winces because, no duh.

“Katie.”

“It's fine, Clint,” Kate finishes putting on her t-shirt and jeans. “We're cool. Partners. That hasn't changed.”

“Partners,” he repeats as Kate opens the door, pets Lucky, and then simply walks out. Lucky looks at him with his one eye. “Oh, don't start, you.”

Lucky huffs and Clint goes to take a bath so he can wash off Kate's fingerprints from his skin.

*

Things don't change. Kate stays true to her word and their partnership doesn't suffer.

If she's not spending so much time there, if there's a barrier between them that wasn't there before, Clint reasons that it should be there, at least for a while, until he can stop fucking up and sabotaging every single important relationship in his life. Because that was what he was doing, he decides, by sleeping with Kate. Fucking up their thing. Because then Kate was going to become part of his car crash of a love life, sooner rather than later, and then he'd lose her too.

So if Kate actually avoids his hand when he was going to touch her shoulder, or if she doesn't watch TV with him, well. It's pretty much his damn fault and he has no right to feel upset about it. He ignores the form he has to deliver, works with Kate, keeps to his building.

It'll get better, he reasons. Soon enough. He's pretty sure.

That's when the world decides to end, by the way.

*

The world decides to ends in a Tuesday because Buffy was right and it always ends in Tuesdays. And the sole reason he remembers Buffy it's because this particular time it's demons invading instead of aliens: demons crawling from the sewers and from haunted houses and it'd be perfect if it was October and not April. Teams are sent to fight with specific orders and, by team, it means that Kate has to lead hers through the closing off a Hell's Mouth over Jersey.

Clint has about ten jokes made on the SPOT just waiting until he has time to tell them to Kate. He grins as he fires arrows of rock salt at ghouls and monsters while Wanda chants her invocations, in a better mood than he should be because, you know. End of the world.

And he would have kept on in high spirits if Wanda hadn't suddenly _screamed bloody murder._ Her eyes flash blue and red and the ghouls around them turn to dust. 

“No, please no,” Wanda sobs, covering her mouth. Clint is the nearest one and he holds her before she falls down.

“Hey, hey, what's wrong?”

“I can't feel them,” she sobs against his chest. “Billy and Tommy. I can't feel them, Clint!”

Which kind of ruins this whole optimist thing he had going on. He wraps an arm around Wanda, but his other hand moves to change frequency from the Avengers' to Kate's.

“Hawkeye, do you copy?”

Static.

“Lady Hawkman, this ain't funny. Hawkguy here. _Do you copy_?”

Static.

“Kate. I swear to god, if you don't answer... ”

Static.

Clint closes his eyes. Wanda is sobbing against his chest and he understands why she screamed. He would do the same, except his pain would do nothing to help save the world. The only thing his pain would get them would be a broken, useless archer that couldn't, didn't save someone important again.

“Wanda. _Wanda,_ ” he grabs her arms. Demons are forming around them. “We have to stop this. For them.”

The pain in Wanda's eyes is a terrible thing. But they're in the middle of a terrible situation, and that's the only way to fix things.

Even if this is something that can't, won't be fixed.

*

The world stops ending on a Saturday. The sun shines through the debris and corpses. They start counting their loses.

The report says that the Young Avengers fell into the Hell's Mouth they were trying to close. The one they managed to close. After they fell. In the dimension they managed to close off for good. Kate and her team are considered officially M.I.A. Since Wednesday. When the world stops ending, they've been dead to the world for almost three whole days.

Wanda cries and cries and cries and Scott holds her, looking suddenly so old. Steve mentions calling in the families, having to go and explain.

Clint stands up and goes back to Bed Stuy.

She's not going to be there, but it's the only place he can mourn her. He feels like a coward for not going to face her father, her sister. He'll go, Clint knows, but not... not then. His phone starts ringing when he's trying to burn his skin off his body in the shower, but he ignores it. He's off duty, he's exhausted, he's aching.

His goddamn heart feels broken and empty like a goddamn shell. Try as he might, he can't recall what was the last thing he told Kate. Probably something stupid, something not important. He keeps doing that, just before he loses someone. He keeps taking them from granted.

Once he's out the shower, he goes directly to his bed, dropping face first. It's been weeks since the last time Kate was in his bed, by his side. There is no scent left of her.

He's too exhausted to dream. Too exhausted to grieve. He sleeps and in his sleep there is only darkness. Terrible, merciful darkness.

*

Phone wakes him up but he ignores it up until it stops mid ringing. He has enough spy-friends that could pick his lock so he sighs, standing up, careful of his wounds.

“Whoever it is, get the hell out,” he calls, still not ready to face his grief, not now, probably not ever.

“But I just got _out_ of hell, bossman, really. Don't I get at least a 'hello, Kate' or something like that? ”

Ah, he thinks. So this is how it feels when you get a heart attack. Because it's kind of one of the only reasons he hasn't gone to the hospital yet. Should've expected it to happen sooner rather than later.

Because Kate is sitting on his couch, wearing a S.H.I.E.L.D standard tracksuit. Half of her hair's gone, barely reaching her chin in an uneven, messy cut that speaks of it being cut with knives rather than scissors. She's got a price-winning shiner over her right eye, a split lip and she looks thinner, her face sharper.

“Did you know that apparently in hell dimensions time goes by faster?” Kate says. Clint feels as if his feet had sprouted roots to the base of the stairs. “So imagine our surprise when Bill finally has the spell to get us back and we come back here and we're told that we weren't gone four months it was barely four days.”

Lucky is leaning hard against her. Kate has her hand against Lucky's head. She's favoring her right leg, Clint notices. He somehow manages to take a breath.

“I thought you were dead.”

Kate smiles, a bit awkwardly with her swollen eye and hurt lip.

“And leave you to take care of your sad ass on your own? Not a chance.”

Clint doesn't manage to actually process the thought of actually crossing the space between them so he can kiss Kate when he's already there, arms wrapped as tight as he can around her. Not kissing her then would be a crime, a sin, and he almost lost her. He was so sure she was dead, had already begun to think of the words he was going to be forced to say, about her life and courage and he had been _so_ sure. So he kisses her, arms around her waist, and he doesn't stop to think, doesn't do anything but feel the slight tremor of her arms around his neck and merrily flicks the finger to anything else that aren't the words _Kate is alive._

*

She's too thin. Between kisses, between taking off her shirt, his shirt, pulling and taking off clothes, she half tells him about where her team was, fighting, dangerous. There's an ugly looking, still pink scar on her left arm that Clint licks and mouths against, more bruises and cuts than he would know what to do when he's used to the white expanse of her skin.

“Katie,” he whispers, lips against her neck. There's going to be another bruise tomorrow there, one of his own making, one that doesn't come from almost dying. “Kate. Kate, jesus, Kate...”

She moans his name too, when he moves down from her arm to her chest, twirling a nipple against his tongue, sucking at it carefully. Kate pushes with her heels so she can reach over the nighttable so she can reach where he has the condoms, making him kneel and kneeling with him so she can roll the condom on him.

She laughs, breathlessly, before pushing him down on the bed, strong, clever hands on his shoulders, moving on top of him and it takes Clint every ounce of will power he ever had to not close his eyes as she sinks down on him. Her eyes half close as she rides him slowly, almost carefully. Her mouth is open, her hands closed tight around his shoulders still. He moves one hand to cup one breast, nipple between his fingers, the other down her stomach – another scar, puckered up and close enough to where her liver is – so he can thumb over her clit. Kate moans hard, biting her lip as she moves faster. Her hands drop from his shoulders to the bed so Clint takes advantage of that, moves up a little so he can suck at her nipple, teasing her clit, trying not to thrust too much, let Katie move as she would, as she want to because he's still in the midst of not being certain she's actually there. .

“Clint,” Kate gasps. “Need to--”

“Yeah,” he whispers. Clint thrusts with her, into her. He moves his hands to her hip so he can help her with the leverage, planting his feet down on the mattress.“Yeah, Katie. Anything you want, anything...”

And then she's curling into him, clenching around him and Clint just manages to last a few moments more to see her through her orgasm before he turns them around, hands tight around her hips so he can thrust twice before he comes, too.

He's exhausted, she's exhausted. They can't stop kissing and touching, _he_ can't stop touching her because she was almost gone.  Kate sleeps against his side and Clint keeps his arm around her and sleeps against her back and if anyone or anything tries to kill her again, they have to go through him..

*

He wakes up on Tuesday, two days after Kate came back to about a zillion messages that he ignores while he makes them breakfast. Kate comes out of her room wearing one of his shirts, hair mussed, her eye an unbecoming shade of green-purple-and-blue.

He hands Kate a cup of coffee and she smiles as if he was offering her diamonds and when he kisses her slowly against the counter she tastes of his toothpaste and smells like him and soon, Clint knows, they're going to have to have a Talk with capital T about Feelings with capital F.

But he's in no rush this time.

After half her cup is done, Kate asks: “What's that, Hawkeye?”

Clint follows her gaze and it falls on the yellow envelope full of forms that he has been ignoring for over two months..

He grins. “So I want to ask you something and you're not allowed to freak out.”


End file.
